Meet Dora n. Watkins, PhD, MSW

My scholarship emerged from my own grappling with intimate questions about resilience, but the deeper I went, the less interested I became in celebrating one's capacity to survive conditions they should never have been required to endure.

I became interested instead in who gets to define resilience. Considering more seriously what we call protective, what we mistake for wellness, and what survival costs. Whose knowledge becomes theory and what becomes possible when people who have historically been researched, interpreted, and spoken for are recognized as theorists of their own lives. Those questions continue to shape both my convictions and the work.

Grounded in Black feminist epistemology and healing justice, my scholarship moves across critical resilience studies, critical participatory and arts-informed inquiry, poetic inquiry, relational knowledge-making, and the arts. Across these spaces, I remain interested in the conditions that make it possible to know, create, heal, flourish, and imagine beyond survival.